At Sundance, Michael Cera Does Mescaline

PARK CITY, Utah — Film festivals are a great opportunity for fresh starts. And drug movies. So if you're Michael Cera, a twenty-four-year-old actor mainly known for wearing hoodies onscreen, a film festival becomes an opportunity to prove that you're not just a guy who plays sweetly immature, awkward virgins who find greater self-confidence through some unthreatening crush on a badass spaz (see: Superbad, Juno, Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist, Paper Heart, Youth in Revolt — hell, his whole IMDb page). If you're Michael Cera, you kick off Sundance with the opening-night film Crystal Fairy, in which you pay an unrepentant, unbearable asshole who guzzles a mug of mescaline.

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In just a few months when Arrested Development returns on Netflix, Cera will return to the role that minted his downtrodden, childish charm — and maybe he's afraid of getting stuck. Perhaps that fear of typecasting is part of the reason why he's arrived at Sundance as the star of not one but two druggie films with hotshot Chilean director Sebastian Silva. (The second, Magic Magic, opens later in the fest, and he's not wearing a hoodie in that one, either.) In Crystal Fairy, which got mostly positive reviews after its showing, Cera plays that asshole druggie at the party who just won't quit.

His two Chilean pals would prefer to talk about life, the weather, the beach, their friends. But Cera, as an obnoxious rich-kid prick who is determined to have an experience with mescaline on a rocky beach, is only on this trip to trip: He's got a monomaniacal focus on finding that cactus that will give him a new high. He is impatient, aggressive, selfish, and insufferable: the ugly American of Burning Man let loose on Chile. At a party, he meets up with hippie druggie Crystal Fairy — a free-love, holistic vegan who sketches soulful pixies and sucks down Coca-Cola and cheese puffs when nobody's looking. Cera mocks her ruthlessly behind her back, and then invites her to join him and his friends when he's out-of-his-mind high. He spends the rest of the movie belittling her to the annoyance of everyone in the film but himself. He steals from a lovely older Chilean lady. He drives his friends crazy.

The experience of watching Crystal Fairy isn't like the experience of hallucinating: There are no pink elephants or tangerine skies. This is the experience of being the one sober wingman in a room of hallucinating assholes. The one guy who ate a Portobello while his pals are dosed on shrooms. The film, shot beautifully in cars and on one spectacular, isolated beach, unspools with the aggressive aimlessness of a bad trip, with confident digressions that seem to lead nowhere, spiritual dialogue that plays like empty bullshit, and lots of infuriating chatter about drugs and getting the drugs and getting high and the exact right way to cook the cactus and extract the mescaline. You feel for the Chilean stars Juan Andrea Silva, Jose Miguel Silva, and Agustin Silva — who gamely endure Cera's bulldozing egotism. Cera, who played a marvelous asshole-celebrity version of himself in Marc Webber's indie The End of Love, is so convincing at playing an unbearable jackass that it's tough to tell, really, if it's a great performance or if the whole film is just supremely obnoxious. Regardless, this is not the immature Cera you've come to know and love and be exhausted by. He's mixing it up, taking a wild trip, and why not? He'll be a Bluth again, soon enough.

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